The Imminent Collapse of Ruby

The premise of this talk is that Ruby is an inherently untrustworthy language, and that a radical re-imagining of its class dependency model is required to ensure its long-term future.

In this talk I will gently but firmly show why a language that was exciting and fresh in 2002, is dangerously flawed in 2013, and will not survive to 2024. I will also propose an replacement set of semantics that retain the “Ruby Way” and are highly backwards-compatible with the Ruby we love. The talk will cover issues with respect to framework vulnerabilities, gem dependencies, unit tests, and programming-by-contract.

About the speaker

Reg “raganwald” Braithwaite is proof that somewhere, a village is missing its idiot. Either that, or a combinatory forest is missing its Idiot Bird, we’re not quite sure. His interests include constructing surreal numbers, deconstructing hopelessly egocentric nulls, and celebrating the joy of programming. He reminds us that “Ragnvald” is a perfectly good Nordic name.